So from the android developer site on Data Storage:
User Preferences
Shared preferences are not strictly for saving "user preferences," such as what ringtone a user has chosen. If you're interested in creating user preferences for your application, see PreferenceActivity, which provides an Activity framework for you to create user preferences, which will be automatically persisted (using shared preferences).
So I think it is okay since it is simply just key-value pairs which are persisted.
To the original poster, this is not that hard. You simply just iterate through your array list and add the items. In this example I use a map for simplicity but you can use an array list and change it appropriately:
// my list of names, icon locations
Map<String, String> nameIcons = new HashMap<String, String>();
nameIcons.put("Noel", "/location/to/noel/icon.png");
nameIcons.put("Bob", "another/location/to/bob/icon.png");
nameIcons.put("another name", "last/location/icon.png");
SharedPreferences keyValues = getContext().getSharedPreferences("name_icons_list", Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
SharedPreferences.Editor keyValuesEditor = keyValues.edit();
for (String s : nameIcons.keySet()) {
// use the name as the key, and the icon as the value
keyValuesEditor.putString(s, nameIcons.get(s));
}
keyValuesEditor.commit()
You would do something similar to read the key-value pairs again. Let me know if this works.
Update: If you're using API level 11 or later, there is a method to write out a String Set
I loaded an array of waist sizes (already created in my array.xml) into my preferences.xml file with the code below. @array/pant_inch_size is the id of the entire array.
Shared preferences introduced a getStringSet and putStringSet methods in API Level 11, but that's not compatible with older versions of Android (which are still popular), and also is limited to sets of strings.
Android does not provide better methods, and looping over maps and arrays for saving and loading them is not very easy and clean, specially for arrays. But a better implementation isn't that hard:
Now you can save any collection in shared preferences with this five methods. Working with JSONObject and JSONArray is very easy. You can use JSONArray (Collection copyFrom) public constructor to make a JSONArray out of any Java collection and use JSONArray's get methods to access the elements.
There is no size limit for shared preferences (besides device's storage limits), so these methods can work for most of usual cases where you want a quick and easy storage for some collection in your app. But JSON parsing happens here, and preferences in Android are stored as XMLs internally, so I recommend using other persistent data store mechanisms when you're dealing with megabytes of data.
The Simple way is, to convert it to JSON String as below example:
Gson gson = new Gson();
String json = gson.toJson(myObj);
Then store the string in the shared preferences.
Once you need it just get string from shared preferences and convert back to JSONArray or JSONObject(as per your requirement.)
When I was bugged with this, I got the serializing solution where, you can serialize your string, But I came up with a hack as well.
Read this only if you haven't read about serializing, else go down and read my hack
In order to store array items in order, we can serialize the array into a single string (by making a new class ObjectSerializer (copy the code from – www.androiddevcourse.com/objectserializer.html , replace everything except the package name))
Entering data in Shared preference :
the rest of the code on line 38 -
Put the next arg as this, so that if data is not retrieved it will return empty array(we cant put empty string coz the container/variable is an array not string)
Coming to my Hack :-
Merge contents of array into a single string by having some symbol in between each item and then split it using that symbol when retrieving it. Coz adding and retrieving String is easy with shared preferences.
If you are worried about splitting just look up "splitting a string in java".
[Note: This works fine if the contents of your array is of primitive kind like string, int, float, etc. It will work for complex arrays which have its own structure, suppose a phone book, but the merging and splitting would become a bit complex. ]
PS: I am new to android, so don't know if it is a good hack, so lemme know if you find better hacks.